[Gnso-epdp-legal] "Bad faith" debate and the purpose of EPDP legal committee

[Tatiana Tropina]

Dear legal committee members, dear Janis.

following the accusation of behaving in "bad faith" during today's EPDP
plenary call, I want to be able to address them. I can not post on the EPDP
mailing list as I am an alternate, but at least I can try to address this
issue here.

I never believed that the mandate of this legal committee was to decide on
the policy issues. I always thought that we get together to draft the
questions in a meaningful way legally and leave it up to EPDP plenary to
decide if they are to be sent at all. I voiced my concern about policy vs.
legal issues on the call on Tuesday when the legal committee decided that
it will provide explanations as to why the questions were asked, and to me,
it sounded that those are explanations to help the EDPD plenary to decide
if the questions are to be sent, not the ultimatum decision to send them or
not. Otherwise, I would have objected strongly.

I want to quote here Janis's email of 31st of May 2019:

"The membership of this team is not representative, but expertise based.
Members of the Legal Advisory Group are asked to provide advice based on
their legal experience, factoring in all aspects of the conversation, not
only that of their respective constituency. It is important to state that
any output of deliberations of the Legal Advisory Group will be shared with
the EPDP Team for review and agreement."

I believe that the legal committee has been established not to substitute
the plenary work, but to help to draft possible legal questions and then
leave it to plenary to decide on whether to send them, whether to approve
them or object. I tried to clarify this with Leon during the first meetings
of the committee whether the plenary had the ultimate say about the
questions and their nature and I remember that this assumption was
confirmed.

If this legal committee is supposed to substitute the work of the plenary
and take policy decisions, this is in my opinion not the right way to go,
or at least such a shift in its role should be agreed and established by
the EPDP plenary.

Participation in drafting in good faith doesn't exclude the idea of
stakeholder group on the call opposing the question per se because it's a
policy question in nature.

In the same way, I can accuse of behaving in bad faith those who try to
substitute policy decisions and EPDP plenary decisions by the work of this
small group which wasn't supposed to substitute plenary on the first place.
I am not sure how this would be helpful, though.

Warm regards,
Tatiana
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